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How a Persian Jewish immigrant became the rodeo king of California
David Halimi grew up Jewish in Tehran, watching Bonanza. He now produces rodeos in Northern California and owns a bar modeled on Cheers.
At 73, Halimi is known around Chico as the man behind a Western wear store stocked with thousands of cowboy boots, a rodeo circuit that draws bull riders from across the region, and a U-shaped bar where locals joke about who might be the town’s version of Norm. Less obvious — but no less central — is that he is also a longtime synagogue president, a Hillel board leader, and a professor who teaches business analytics at the local university.
Asked how an Iranian Jew learned the rhythms of the American West, Halimi doesn’t mystify it. “I’m a quick learner,” he said.
Halimi still follows events in Iran closely. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “It’s my heritage.” He has no illusions about the imbalance of power. “People protesting with their bare hands are no match to machine guns and professional assassins.” Still, he allows himself hope. “I wish and I pray that the people will prevail.”
For Halimi, the distance between Iran and Chico is not just geographic. It is the distance between a life shaped by instability — he grew up in Iran in the aftermath of a coup — and one he has spent decades deliberately building.
On a recent afternoon inside the 6,000-square-foot Diamond W Western Wear, Halimi wore what he sells — black alligator boots, jeans, a button-down, blazer and a hat — and moved easily past towers of boots, glass cases of belt buckles, pausing as an employee steamed a cowboy hat back into shape. His wife, Fran, emerged from the back. Customers drifted in.
Over the years, his footprint downtown has expanded to include two restaurants and a soon-to-open coffee shop, all within walking distance of his store.
Halimi didn’t arrive in America looking for a job. He arrived looking for an opportunity. When he moved to the United States at 16, in 1969, he worked full time while going to school, bussing tables at a restaurant and saving aggressively. By 18, he had pooled his earnings with his older brother to make his first real estate investment. “I was never looking for a job,” he said. “I always wanted to do my own thing.”
That instinct carried him through college, where he studied mathematics and economics, and later into commodities trading — “the stock market on steroids,” as he put it — before settling in Chico in 1979. It had the virtues he was looking for: a small-town feel, a university’s energy, and room to build.
Mending fences, building community
For all the boots, buckles and bull riders, Halimi’s most consequential work happens closer to home. He has served on the board of Congregation Beth Israel of Chico for decades, including numerous stints as president, and has been a steady presence through the cycles that define small Jewish communities.
Rabbi Lisa Rappaport, who leads the congregation, said that constancy matters. In a community with limited resources, leadership often means stepping in wherever the need arises.
That was especially true after the synagogue was targeted with antisemitic graffiti in late 2022. What followed, Rappaport recalled, was an outpouring of support. Donations funded a new security system. A local metalworker volunteered to create a new sign. Another family, moved by the response, offered to pay for a fence.
Halimi volunteered to design and help build it. Vertical bars, he insisted, would make the synagogue feel like a jail. Instead, he created diagonal metal panels inspired by math’s golden ratio, incorporating stainless-steel symbols of the Twelve Tribes — a boundary meant to protect without closing the place off.
Rappaport credits both Halimi and his wife, a former religious school director and longtime sisterhood leader, with helping sustain the shul. “They’re in it till the end,” she said. In a small community, she added, that kind of commitment is existential. “If you have a couple of people who have that frame of mind,” she said, “it keeps the community alive. It’s people like that that keep it pulsing.”
Halimi, now a grandfather, carries that same lesson into his classroom at Chico State, where he has been teaching since 2009. Each semester he leads two courses: business analytics and the evolution of management theory. He doesn’t think of it as a job so much as a responsibility. “I like seeing the light bulb go on,” he said. Former students, now entrepreneurs themselves, sometimes track him down to say thank you. The payoff, he said, is “psychic income.”
Halimi teaches what he learned: “Even when the odds are against you,” he said, “you can still succeed.”
His rodeo business began, improbably enough, as a marketing complaint. Halimi had been sponsoring country concerts and rodeos to promote the store, but he was unimpressed with the results. Other sponsors, he noticed, felt the same way. So he launched his own production company. First, they hosted country music concerts. Soon, they built a rodeo: the National Bullriding Championship Tour, which just marked its 30th year.
He had expected resistance from the industry. Instead, he found acceptance, and eventually respect. “It’s very unusual,” he acknowledged, “for an Iranian Jew to be a successful rodeo producer.”
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Providence voters pass ballot initiative that could lead to divestment of city funds from Israel
(JTA) — Voters in Providence, Rhode Island, have approved a ballot measure that could result in the city divesting public funds from Israel, according to local media, in a major victory for the Israel boycott movement.
In a major victory for the Israel boycott movement, voters in Providence, Rhode Island, have approved a ballot measure that could result in the city divesting public funds from Israel, according to local media.
With 81 of 82 polling locations partially reported, the Rhode Island Board of Elections tallied 75% voting to approve the measure versus 25% rejecting. Both the Rhode Island Current and the Boston Globe report the measure was approved.
“We are overjoyed that the city of Providence has voted — by more than a 3 to 1 margin — to divest our collective dollars from support for genocide and ethnic cleansing,” Lex Rofeberg, who runs the alternative Jewish engagement network Judaism Unbound and was an organizer with the Providence divestment initiative, told JTA. “This historic moment can serve as an example for other cities around the country hoping to align their investments with their values.”
The ordinance calls for the capital city to refrain from investing in “foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide.” Though the ballot language does not mention Israel by name, it was heavily supported by local pro-Palestinian groups and opposed by some Jewish and pro-Israel groups.
A representative for the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island previously told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the group would explore legal options to challenge the ballot measure in the event that it passed.
The vote makes Providence the largest municipality yet to vote in favor of some form of Israel divestment, following the lead of Somerville, Massachusetts, whose voters approved a nonbinding divestment measure last year. Providence is home to an estimated 15,000 Jews, or around 7% of its population. Progressive Jewish groups, including the local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, were among the ballot measure’s advocates.
The city’s mayor, Brett Smiley, a pro-Israel Democrat who converted to Judaism while in office, lost his primary to a democratic socialist, an early indicator of which way the divestment vote would go.
Activist initiatives to challenge U.S. financial aid to Israel have picked up steam in the years since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and ensuing Gaza war. On the morning of Election Day, President Donald Trump, who described aid to Israel as a political liability, announced the U.S. would end nearly $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel by the end of the year.
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Republican Lawler concedes to Democrat Conley in fierce battle for Jewish vote in NYC suburbs
(JTA) — Republican congressman Mike Lawler has conceded to Democratic challenger Cait Conley, a former national security official, after competing fiercely for Jewish voters in the lower Hudson Valley of New York.
Lawler has been a staunchly pro-Israel member since joining Congress in 2023, and was endorsed by the Republican Jewish Coalition and the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC.
Conley was endorsed by the pro-Israel group Democratic Majority for Israel, and has said she supports Israel while opposing the Benjamin Netanyahu government.
Lawler, who is Catholic, has deep ties to the district’s large Orthodox Jewish population, and touted their support recently when asked about the neck-and-neck polling.
Both Lawler and Conley have tried tying their opponent to polarizing figures in their respective parties. Lawler has asserted that Conley, a moderate, will not separate herself from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and particularly New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has a lower favorability rating outside the city. Conley denounced Mamdani’s statement on the three-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack after Lawler challenged her to do so during a debate.
Conley, meanwhile, has tied Lawler to President Donald Trump, accusing him of being a rubber stamp for Trump’s legislative priorities.
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In early LA mayoral results, Karen Bass holds slim lead over Nithya Raman, who sparred with DSA on Israel
Early returns in the Los Angeles mayoral election showed incumbent Karen Bass with a slim lead over Councilmember Nithya Raman, whose comments on Israel became a flashpoint in the race.
The first batch of results — totaling about 500,000 votes — showed Bass leading Raman, 50.8% to 49.2%.
The final outcome may not be known until Wednesday or later, a common occurrence in tight California races due to the preponderance of mail-in ballots. Nearly 90% of California voters did so by mail in the June primary.
But if the primary results are any indication, Bass’ lead may evaporate as more votes are counted.
In the June 2 open primary — a system in which the top two vote-getters from any party advance to a runoff — Raman trailed a Republican, Spencer Pratt, by eight points for second place behind Bass. She won the ensuing batches of mail-in ballots, but did not pass Pratt until June 7. She ultimately surpassed him by more than four percentage points.
Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has clashed with the organization — and frustrated many of her Jewish constituents — while trying to strike a balance on Israel. She has called the war in Gaza a genocide, but declined to adopt the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions platform — a stance that led the DSA to consider expelling her.
Bass, a mainstream Democrat who served six terms in Congress before running for mayor in 2022, entered the race as a historically unpopular incumbent, largely thanks to her response to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. Raman endorsed Bass prior to declaring her own candidacy on the last day to enter the race, a move Bass has characterized as a personal betrayal.
The polls swung back and forth in the weeks leading up to the election. Bass, who won most labor endorsements, was leading until September, when one poll sponsored by the Los Angeles Times showed Raman ahead by 11 points with a third of voters still undecided. A follow-up poll by the Times last week showed the two in a dead heat.
Unlike many other DSA candidates up for election across the country on Tuesday, Raman, an urban policy wonk who immigrated to the U.S. from India when she was 6, never made Israel a focal point of her campaign. Instead, she focused more on housing, homelessness and budget policy.
But her membership in the DSA, an interview she granted Hasan Piker during the primary and the genocide comments dogged her anyway, especially among Jewish Angelenos.
Raman, after publicly condemning the DSA’s anti-Israel statements after Oct. 7, sponsored a resolution for a ceasefire and return of hostages in March 2024, disappointing mainstream Jewish groups who called the motion one-sided. Then, during the primary, Raman told Piker she believed the Gaza war was a genocide and that Israel was an apartheid state. She also said she would not seek the endorsement of pro-Israel Democratic party groups as she had in 2024.
Her record on Israel seemed likely to come up when Raman participated in the candidate forum for Jewish voters Sept. 29. But Raman struggled to get through answers about the DSA, Piker and especially genocide and BDS — which she called a “legitimate form of peaceful protest” — leading to loud audience groans. During Bass’ turn on stage, the mayor said she did not support BDS and did not believe the war in Gaza was a genocide.
Mail-in voters historically skew to the left, and the primary vote may offer a preview of the margin Raman might need.
In that election, about 58% of the total votes were tallied election night, when Bass led Raman 36.5% to 21%. Raman got the biggest share of the ensuing ballot batches, beating Bass by about five percentage points.
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